SAUL CHASE

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Essay 1

Essay 2

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Noir Luminism
By Douglas Kelly

I've been trying to coin a term to describe this painter Saul Chase and I was in the Art Deco elevator of the Film Center Building when it hit me, Noir Luminism. He's the Noir Luminismist? It sounded about right to me.

Luminism was 19th century American art sub genre, that was an outgrowth of the Hudson River school, which had among its chief concerns the romantic and heroic capture of grand atmospheric and lighting effect that some say suggest early links to impressionism. But not quite. It practitioners included Frederick E. Church (in his early career), Fitz Hugh Lane, John F. Kensett, and Sanford R. Gifford. They were all about the majestic landscape bathed in the mystical light of a pristine sky with an emphasis on Natures grand scale. But Chases paintings were a little dark, not cloudy, or gloomy, but emotional and complex. Like a fine wine.Two weeks ago I took a train trip up the Harlem Hudson line visit the digs of this newly reemerging artist and at the station he picked me up in a black SUV and we drove on to an area promised to be less townie and more in keeping with the mountain hideout of a runaway Soho artist from the 70s. I was expecting a log cabin or Quonset hut with an outhouse and I couldn't been more shocked and pleased when we pulled up to what so clearly I would consider my own dream home type set-up.

Leave it to an artist, as if by magic, on his very first house hunting trip as he abandoned Soho in the 80s, he completely lucked out by finding a truly amazingly unspoiled virgin peak that overlooks a state park - a setting so gorgeously sublime, that while it doesn't exactly put Hudson River artist Frederick Church's Moorish mansion Olana to shame, it sure gives it a run for the money.

The main house is a sizable and greatly expanded converted barn, except all the exterior red boarding has been replaced by floor to ceiling glass ala Philip Johnson and it has an open Mediterranean courtyard style stairwell with a giant loft style open plan kitchen on the second floor to maximize the glorious of Vista. As we walk in the places bursting with parakeets chirping, lumbering hounds who stroll through (some of whom do very elaborate tricks) and lots of plants and beautiful kids, there are six in total, even though I only saw three.

At the top of the stairs we were and greeted by his heavenly and gorgeous black wife Ingrid, and by incredibly sweet whiffs coming from the help-yourself all-you-can-eat deluxe-smorgasbord lunch she was preparing Martha Stewart style of freshly baked breads, hand made mozzarella cheese, fresh tomatoes, olives, prosciutto and, and other delicacies too numerous to mention.

I tell you boys The Chases are living large. It is inspiring to see artists do well, and Mr. and Mrs. Chase have done very well, very, very well. Being obviously so sharp in a multitude of areas, in the last 20 years, in their spare time, in addition to everything else, they seem to made a fortune in frozen foods, but that's another story. Despite all the success Saul Chase still is a sensitive, shy, curious, disciplined and intensely dedicated artist. Albeit one who is very secure in his artistic prejudices.

A separate building houses his studio and exhibition space. I kid you not; the guy has his own one room museum where I saw what he was going to be exhibiting.

Too bad I’m such an erratic interviewer, sometimes nearly catatonic and at other times so absorbed in running out my own interior monologue I cant leave room for the other person, but either way I can only remember what I think I said.

Your Paintings are lonely too. Not as lonely as Hopper but more lonely than Turner. And.....

Even the small ones are vast and dark. And you're a romantic.

Romantic is good, I thought I heard him say.

Of course use the term loosely. The 20th century's intellectual and literary history and characterization of romanticism has been very wishy washy, as far as I’m concerned, I just think I know it when I see it.

My opinion is Mr. Chase sprang forth as a youth artist as a fully informed intellectual naive with a high degree of skill in Painting in the last era before post modernism and so was naturally predisposed to being a Platonist romantic medievalist but now in his mature development he is loosening of the Architectural structure in favor of a noir illuminism.

This is just a guess but Id bet that unlike many of his contemporaries in art school who were influenced by or flat out imitated abstract expressionism or cubist constructs or proto-typical pop art ideals, Mr. Chase was an enamored early on by the idealism of realism painters. Up to a point.

His early paintings were often large canvases of stark urban scenes reminiscent of youth in the South Bronx based on sharp lines, large shapes of pastel colors, processed through a lens of low angle afternoon sun to convey a lonely, positively medieval, mood.

In the last 20 years he has shifted over to a Howard Hodgkin-esgue vocabulary of the impossible imaginary romantic semi representational landscape. (Although he arrived from the opposite direction, from realism.) Nevertheless Chase retains his uncanny ability to render, and in a palpable way, the same scorching twilight in the canvases he painted of his native South Bronx that he does with the muted but breathtaking fantasy landscapes inspired of his current region.

That his painterly vision continues to encompass this fascination with nature and its ability to reveal its existential extra ordinariness is a legacy to (I bet) his main inspiration, the original the painter of light. English Romantic landscape artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851).

Its the deliberate emphasis on an emotional response to nature stuff that leaps out at you, along with small hints of creating work of symbolic and spiritual nature that conveys how the artists feel about his subject. He feels deeply.

Like another 19th century sub-genre I can think of Synthetism, his style shows a conscious effort to work less directly from nature and to rely more upon memory.

Hodgkin has said that he paints representational pictures of emotional situations. That could go for Chase as well.

Ariana Reines wrote a very nice piece about Saul, "The Paintings of Saul Chase." but on two minor points I would like to disagree? Specifically her suggestions that his paintings are somehow "pastoral" and exhibit "mimesis."

First the latter (I hate mimesis to pieces.)

Mimesis? What the $%#$! is that, I hear you cry?

This goes way, way, way back to Plato and Aristotle who contrasted mimesis with diegesis. In diegesis it is not the form in which a work of art represents reality but that in which the author is the speaker who is describing events in the narrative he presents to the audience. It is in diegesis that the author addresses the audience or the readership directly to express his freely creative art of the imagination, of fantasies and dreams in contrast to mimesis. Diegesis was thought of as telling, the author narrating action indirectly and describing what is in the characters mind and emotions, while mimesis is seen in terms of showing what is going on in characters inner thoughts and emotions through his external actions.

Diegesis, however, is the main narrative in fiction and drama, the telling of the story by the author, in that he speaks to the reader or the audience directly. He may speak through his characters or may be the invisible narrator or even the all-knowing narrator who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters.

Diegesis in art as in film

In film, diegesis is the narrative that includes all the parts of the story that are not actually shown on the screen, such as events that have led up to the present action; people who are being talked about; or events that are presumed to have happened elsewhere; in fact, all the frames, spaces and actions not focused on visually in the films main narrative.

Mr. Chase's Paintings linger because of the open ended story in every one of them that goes both Ford and backward. So I think diegesis not mimesis. (But close enough.)

Concerning Pastoral

It's really an archaic term that has fallen out of a fashion due to disuse. A term that doesn't have a thing to do with pastures, it was a style of illustration of mythic scenery which often told epochly stupid stories.

Mr. Chase's Paintings are 20th century post romantic post realist Synthetic Noir Luminismistic time portals. (I like to keep saying this, hoping it will ring true.) There execution is not so confident and heroic as Georgia O'Keefe but more accessible and less so austere and absent and chilly as Edward Hopper. But pretty chilly none-the-less.

There's NOT anything faintly pastoral about Saul Chases paintings, as there's nothing in them to do with any nonsensical neoclassical imagery of goats and shepherds cavorting in neatly tended hill and dale designed to give veneers of the respectability to the classics of nymphs, swains, satyrs, and other mostly human legendary creatures wandering about the country side in a state of perpetual dishabille (an English noun meaning casually, carelessly, or only partly dressed.)

The purely pastoral genre went out with a buggy whip, which is pretty remarkable that a whole genre of sexual fantasy that has fallen almost completely out of fashion. (Sissel Kardel may be bringing it back though?)

The Crispo Exhibition Gap

Many artists who disappear for a while they raise children and struggle with the vicissitudes of life have no explanation for their exhibition gaps however Mr. Chase has an incredibly good excuse. His dealer was the scandal-prone Manhattan art dealer Andrew Crispo, who most recently was sentenced in 2000 to seven years in prison for attempted extortion in connection with threats to kidnap the four-year-old daughter of a lawyer involved in his bankruptcy case, (he's out now and gone straight I've heard.)

But that's not all. Unseemly details of Crispo's non artistic misadventures include a stint in the slammer for tax evasion, a scandal over alleged involvement in the February 1985 sadomasochistic ritual murder (though never charged) of Egil Vesti, a gay fashion student and runway model from Norway, a separate juicy lawsuit over sadomasochistic sex at a 1984 coke party at Crispo Gallery on 57th Street (acquitted) and the 1989 explosion of his art-filled Long Island house (he received $5 million from the Long Island Lighting Company- ka-ching!) can all be found in David Frances Bag of Toys: Sex, Scandal and the Death Mask Murder (Warner Books, 1992. Which I can only recommend to the not so squeamish, because it confirms absolutely the worst things you might ever suspect about a famous dealer, but it does make a fascinating summer read.)

Those piddling legal annoyances aside Crispo had an extremely eye and acute business sense. And it was a very happening Gallery but such notable stumbles biter dealer could put a crimp in anybody's exhibition schedule.


Some of the artist that Saul Chase has affinity with: Milton Avery (1885-1965), George Wesley Bellows (1882-1925), Simon Blaisdell (1881-1965), William Partridge Burpee (1846-1940), Thomas Crotty (1954-), Rackstraw Downes (1939-), Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Childe Hassam (1859-1935), Robert Henri (1865-1929), Winslow Homer (1836-1910), Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Alex Katz (1927-), Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), Wiliam Kienbusch (1914-1980), John Marin (1870-1953), Georgia OKeeffe (1887-1986), Waldo Peirce (1884-1970), Fairfield Porter (1907-1975), Maurice Prendergast (1861-1924), Edward Willis Redfield (1869-1965), Elizabeth B. Robinson (1832-1897), Niles Spencer (1883-1952), Carl Sprinchron (1887-1971), Reuben Tam (1916-), Neil Welliver (1929-), Gina Werfel (1951-), Nancy Wisseman-Widrig (1929-), Charles H. Woodbury (1864-1940), Mabel May Woodward (1877-1945)